ART/ARCHITECTURE; A Surrealist And the Widow Who Keeps The Flame

BEFORE his death in 1965, the Austrian émigré architect Frederick Kiesler made his wife, Lillian, promise that she would try to prevent people from calling him a Surrealist. When I finally met Lillian Kiesler toward the end of her life, I assured her that I would naturally record Kiesler's wishes but probably not honor them. Not all of his work was Surrealist, but the term does not, in my view, misrepresent the projects that hold the greatest interest for architects today. She was agreeable about it. Now I've kept my part of the bargain.

Lillian Kiesler died in her sleep four weeks ago at the age of 91. She was living in the same Greenwich Village apartment where she and Kiesler met in 1934. She gave me this account of the meeting:

She was studying with the painter Hans Hoffman. Her date one night, a fellow student, Burgoyne Diller, told her that if she wanted to know about the art of the 20th century -- or the 23rd, 24th and 25th centuries -- there was one man she had to meet. Diller called up Kiesler and asked if they could drop by. Kiesler asked Diller to describe Lillian's appearance, from the head down. ''She has apple cheeks and cornflower eyes . . . ''

Before Diller could get any further, Kiesler asked him to send his date over -- alone. She was, he said, the woman of his dreams. Since his youth, he'd had a recurring dream in which he was traveling on a train, the train pulled into a station and a young girl came up to the window of his compartment, holding up a bowl of milk. Diller's description of Lillian matched the girl in Kiesler's dream. She went up to the apartment, a penthouse, and rang the bell. Kiesler opened the door, looked into her eyes and invited her inside. At this point in telling the no doubt oft-told tale, Lillian gestured behind the visitor's head. ''And I came in that door, and I'm still here.''

Lillian Kiesler was a keeper of the flame, a major league, big-time artist's widow. I mean no disrespect by calling her Lillian. Everyone called her that -- even me before I'd actually met her -- just as Kiesler was, to her, always Kiesler, not Mr. Kiesler, Frederick or my husband. (They didn't marry, officially, until 1964, a year before Kiesler died.) Lillian deserves credit for much of Kiesler's enduring influence on architecture today. Just as she paid court to Kiesler, so we paid court to Lillian. (I am grateful to Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Lower Manhattan, for enabling me to cross over Lillian's threshold.)

You don't have to be a Surrealist to understand the vital importance of being with someone you first met in a dream. But it probably helps. It also helps to be a Surrealist if you wish to practice architecture as an outsider. With the possible exception of Frank Lloyd Wright, outsiders have a hard time finding clients. Kiesler certainly did. That's why he is a model for those who wish to pursue architecture as an ''alternative practice.'' Somehow, he made a go of it. Diller and Scofidio, Raimund Abraham, Greg Lynn, Wolf Prix and Eric Owen Moss are among many independent architects today who stand on Kiesler's shoulders.

Kiesler settled in the United States in 1926. Before then, he worked mainly in the field of stage design, often in the aesthetic associated with the Dutch de Stijl movement. In the United States, Kiesler specialized in installations of Surrealist and abstract painting. The best known of these was his 1942 design for Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery. Though Wallace Harrison and Philip Johnson were early supporters, Kiesler's reputation was more secure in art world circles. To the larger public, it rested chiefly on the bronze model of ''The Endless House,'' which has been exhibited more or less continuously at the Museum of Modern Art since 1958.

It is tempting now to see this fascinating project as the precursor to the Blob architecture of Ben van Berkel, Caroline Bos and others who use animation software. To me, the house has always symbolized the collapse of dualisms -- between art and architecture, interior and exterior, and, above all, form and content. It is at once an abstract sculpture and the corniest image you can think of -- the human heart. Or (even cornier) the union of two hearts, with common chambers, circulation and emotions. Home is where the heart is, and the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

Similarly, the beautiful metal nesting table that Kiesler designed for the graphics designer Alma Mergentine in 1935 isn't simply a composition of abstract shapes. Like work by Miró, Arp and Noguchi, the piece holds psychological content. This is Rorschach design. See what you like. I see an essay on an Eastern concept: ''two but not two.'' The table is an aluminum ideogram on which a person might display an empty cover of ''The Book of Tea.''

I think of Kiesler's projects as architecture without exteriors. The projection of a dream space into the outer world -- that was exterior enough. Theater projects -- the Film Guild Cinema on Eighth Street (1929), the unbuilt Universal Theater project (1960) -- elicited memorable studies of interiority. They are dark, Orphic spaces, kingdoms of the shade to which the lyric artist must descend in order to procure images. Each image could be the last. Should Apollo turn his back, the artist will be hacked to bloody bits.

Kiesler's preoccupation with large, mythical themes reached a climax with the one extant example of his built work, the Shrine of the Book. Completed in 1965, this free-standing pavilion of the Israel Museum was designed (with Armand Bartos) to exhibit the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the major archaeological discoveries of all time. Kiesler's design is an architectural manifesto. With it, he sought to counter the functionalist dogmas to which architecture remained subject throughout the postwar decades. The result is one of the 20th century's greatest buildings, a poetic work that weaves together common threads from the modern state of Israel and its ancestral homeland.

Two-thirds of the Shrine is concealed below ground level. Above, a low, wide white dome rises from a square reflecting pool surrounded by a plaza atop a stone plinth. The dome's center flares upward to form a truncated cone. Jets of water, shooting up from the pool, wash the dome.

The entrance to the Shrine is marked by the dome's visual counterpoint, a vertical black basalt slab. The entrance leads to an underground tunnel, through arches of biomorphic contour. The arches recall the caves where the scrolls were preserved for 2,000 years. The tunnel disgorges into the Shrine proper, just beneath the dome. Here, the black and white scheme is reiterated in the contrast beneath the dome's underside and a vertical black form in the center. This form is a kind of spindle: an inverted version of one of the pots in which the scrolls were stored; a scroll handle; an exclamation point; or the handle of a notary's stamp -- this is the deed to the land for the People of the Book.

Kiesler denied that the building was symbolic. No, the dome was not a female breast. No, the black spindle was not an inverted jar, a phallus, a scroll handle or any other figurative device. It is partly an enigma, partly an evocation of the dream state in which remembered images, floating through changing contexts, acquire different connotations.

It's useful to keep in mind something Robert Motherwell once said: a lot of trouble might have been avoided if abstract expressionism had been called abstract Surrealism instead. Abstract paintings are not graphic designs, not purely visual compositions. They are states of mind, physical responses, galaxies, encounters between inner and outer worlds. In 1948, Kiesler coined the term Coreallism: an approach in which these two worlds are equally ''real.'' The Shrine of the Book is a sublime embodiment of this concept.

''The Book'' (the scrolls) is an Enigma, also. Since the discovery of the scrolls a half-century ago, they have raised more questions than they have answered. Some of them belong to the tradition of Jewish messianic literature. These were most likely composed by a separatist sect of Judaism, which flourished in the Second Temple era (300 B.C. to 70 A.D.). Like Gnosticism and Mannichaeism, the sect's beliefs were dualistic. The scrolls speak of a final battle between the ''Princes of Darkness'' and the ''Sons of Light.''

Passages in the scrolls seem to anticipate New Testament depictions of Christ. Thus, they may document the Jewish construction of a messiah figure, and other aspects of Christian belief, some years before the birth of Jesus. At the very least, the scrolls evoke the diversity of Judaism in the era when Christianity emerged. They support the view that Christianity was initially one of several reform Jewish movements of that time. To some, they suggest that Christianity might have developed along different lines than those eventually adopted by the Church of Rome.

Until recently, I would have said something analogous about Kiesler's architecture. It makes us wonder what might have happened had modern architecture developed along ''coreallistic'' or psychoanalytic lines instead of formalist and functionalist ones. Surrealism began as a separatist sect and by the 1950's it had again become marginal. But today the situation has changed. We no longer have to wonder what might have been. Forty years after Keisler's death, many architects are proceeding along the route he opened up. Besides those I've mentioned, the group includes Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, Steven Holl, Frank Gehry, Philippe Starck, Lebbeus Woods and Thom Mayne. Coreallists all.

I don't mind pushing the Dead Sea Scroll analogy to gaga extremes: comparing the contemporary city, for example, to a valley of cave-riddled cliffs in which it is possible to uncover the most extraordinary histories, fragments, alternative realities, like those of Lillian Kiesler in her Village penthouse, surrounded by archives, memories and rooms that visitors were not invited to see. It is not an exaggeration, however, to state that this cave is one of the places from which today's architecture came. The practice nowadays is largely in the hands of separatists: small firms that have broken with business-class norms to pursue the Orphic dimensions of urban space.

There's a Darwinian struggle going on, in the city now, between these firms and the larger corporate entities preferred by real estate developers. Kiesler reminds us that the struggle is not new. More important, he suggests that the conflict, too, is Coreallistic. It reflects at once the internal contradictions of urban life, and of those who respond to them creatively. Dome, slab, tunnel, plaza: these are counter-propositions of the imagination, offered in response to the violent history of a still-contested site.